Black screen with cursor after login, explorer.exe not running

I've read a hundred threads on this and tried everything, no success so far. Here's the situation:

• On boot, login screen appears, I enter password, Windows begins to boot, then black screen with cursor.
• Ctrl-Alt-Delete does bring up Task Manager, and from there I can launch a bunch of stuff ... was even able to start Firefox from command line, download Autoruns, etc.
• Explorer.exe is not running in Task Manager. If I "manually" run it, it does appear in running programs list, but desktop remains black.
• Win-P arrow arrow etc doesn't do anything for me.
• SFC says that everything is fine.
• In Device Manger, I've tried updating display driver, as well as changing to the MS generic display driver. No joy, and anyways the display driver seems fine since I'm able to manually launch stuff from Task Manager.
• In Device Manager, "View/Show Hidden Devices" brings up second Display adapter. If I delete this, it comes back on reboot.
• System Restore has one restore point, but when I select it, Windows says that it doesn't actually exist.
• This is a laptop with no external devices attached to it. Intel 945GM chipset. There are no video options in the bios.
• Windows 10 Professional 1511. This problem occurred after I upgraded to Creators 1703, had problems that I couldn't resolve, and asked Windows to roll back to previous version (1511).

Thanks for any help!

mc510 said:

Okay, repair install doesn't sound too disruptive ... the link says that the ISO must be the same or newer build. I've got a 1511 Threshold 2 ISO (10586.164), but my laptop build number has incremented a bit beyond that (10586.twohundredsomething) due to patches from Windows Update. Should the ISO work anyways for repair install? Versions newer than 1511 don't work on this laptop.

Alrighty, repair installation worked, and all my settings, documents, and apps are still there, so phew. Apparently it's not necessary for the full build number of the ISO to match the installed version, only that the integer portion match.